Congress and President Bush apparently think that a lot of children have a "mental health" problem.
Or that enough of them do to justify taking millions of dollars from taxpayers to fund a universal "mental health screening" for children, and eventually for everyone.
Personally, I think -- from the perspective of a person who never had any -- that almost all children act crazy.
On the farm there is a solution for that: a procedure for turning boy lambs into non-ram lambs.
We don't do surgery like that on little boys, of course, but we do have our methods: such as behavioral therapy and chemicals.
Bad, disruptive, antisocial or depressed little kids make lots of trouble for parents and schoolteachers.
That snotty little boy might become a dissenting, nonconformist or even a rebellious man, who could throw a monkey wrench into our smoothly functioning society.
A bonus is that your little darlings will probably give them quite a bit of information about you also, and then you too can receive therapy you didn't know you needed.
Drugs (Ritalin, antidepressants, tranquilizers, maybe some new ones that need to be tested on some experimental subjects of your child's age).
If an interview with a child raises concerns, the next step might be a home visit.
This could discover poor parenting skills, inadequate housekeeping, harmful literature, or a baby who is crying or has a bruise (signs of abuse?).
The mental health workers' impressions will all be recorded in the school records.
Should an extremist Christian be one of the screeners, he might think that nonbelievers are possessed by the devil.
Can you refuse to participate in the program?
Miraculously, throughout human history most of those crazy children have become stable, productive adults without federally mandated psychiatric treatment.